I open a thread for eventual comments on Chapter 2. Comments can of course be sent to me by e-mail. Thanks for those of you who read the chapter and commented on it.

Abstract

In Chapter 2, I distinguish two meanings of the term “concept” in philosophy—concepts as capacities for having propositional attitudes and concepts as components of propositions. On this basis, I argue that the term “concept” is ambiguous between philosophy and psychology. When philosophers and psychologists are developing theories of concepts, they are really theorizing about different things. This conclusion undercuts many of the arguments made by philosophers against the theories of concepts developed by psychologists. Finally, in the last two sections, I discuss what the relation between the philosophical theories of concepts and the psychological theories of concepts could be. In the fourth section, I criticize at some length a proposal made by Christopher Peacocke (1992)—the Simple Account: Philosophers should determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for possessing a concept and psychologists should explain how the human mind can meet these conditions. In the last section, I focus more briefly on a proposal inspired by Jerry Fodor’s criticisms of the psychological theories of concepts: While psychologists explain behavior and cognition by ascribing contentful mental states, philosophers explain how people can have contentful states.